We are lucky enough to have arranged to have cover art for The Reeve’s Tale by the incredibly talented Frank Victoria, whose concept art you will have seen make it into props and costumes and such in major Hollywood movies such as The Hobbit and Thor

It’s been a while since the last general update. Sorry about that. We’ve all been busy, as per usual. I personally am unable to devote much time to SKG right now due to a combination of day-job workload, and final months of PhD write-up. I’m hoping I should be on the home stretch of my PhD by the end of summer, and able to get back to it, but at the moment I barely have time to do the essentials like the accounts.

Fortunately, Chris and Kieran have been hard at work trying to finish off some older projects that have been languishing in development hell for a while. Here’s where we are with those:

The Reeve’s Tale. This is written, and laid out, and ready to go, except we’re waiting on one last map. Hopefully this should be available on DTRPG over the next few weeks, though.

Cold Fury. As many of you know, we struggled for a long while to secure the rights to all the material from the Magnum Opus Press edition of In From The Cold. We came to the conclusion that we just weren’t going to get a chance to reprint The Key of Tirandor. That would have left the book a bit short, especially because we didn’t want to make you buy the Daemonology rules twice (they are now in the Players Book, after all). So, for the first time in hardcopy form, we’ve added in Fury of the Deep, the much-loved scenario by Jon Reed and Damian May. This seemed to need a new title… so, In From the Cold + Fury of the Deep = COLD FURY. Cold Fury, too, is close to being finished — the layout will change a little, and we’ve written a new intro, but this is largely a reprint of both text and art, so it should be pretty quick. Expect it soon after The Reeve’s Tale.

The Summoner’s Tale. This is the next short adventure. Still needs some tweaking, and art. We’ll get there though.

That’s all for the moment (we have other stuff on the back burner, but aren’t ready to raise hopes yet!), but, rest assured, we’ve not all vanished, and we’re still committed to bringing you new(ish) stuff for Dragon Warriors, as fast as we can.

Dave Morris, co-creator of Dragon Warriors, has a new Kickstarter project for his much-loved Fabled Lands gamebook series. This reunites Dave and Jamie Thomson, the original Fabled Lands writers, with Russ Nicholson, the classic fantasy artist who illustrated the original Fabled Lands series (as well as Book 6 of the 1980s edition of Dragon Warriors, among many other things).

Want to see a sequel to the Fabled Lands? We didn’t see one for many years, and the reason is largely one of money. In the glory days of the 1980s, you could publish a gamebook (or even a paperback RPG book like Dragon Warriors…), see it stocked in major bookshops, sell tens of thousands of copies, and expect, not to become wealthy (chance would be a fine thing) but at least to make a reasonable living as a writer and game designer. These days that’s a lot trickier, even using Kickstarter, even for an established author.

But Fabled Lands, and their partners at Megara, are managing it. They’ve funded the Kickstarter already (within 45 minutes!). There will be a new Fabled Lands book. More funding will mean better art, though. Get to it. 35 euro for a hardcover, beautifully illustrated, fantastically written slice of gaming magic.

Oh, and it’s called The Serpent King’s Domain, which would make us feel very happy here at Serpent King Games, if the title had anything to do with us! It seems to be one of those ‘great minds think alike’ moments, though.

First up, apologies for getting all of you as excited as we all got, towards the end of last year. The book has been all laid out and ready to go to print for three months now.

So, why don’t you have a copy in your hands yet? We ran into a few problems getting it uploaded to DriveThruRPG. These took a couple of months to resolve. We now do have the book uploaded and ready to print… but we’re waiting on two proof copies that have been posted out to us, one to our fantastic new layout expert Chris, and one to me, so we can give them one final check-over before we make this available to order for everyone.

Sorry, again, about the delay. As you’ll all know by now, the four of us are doing this part-time at best. It’s just a question of squeezing in time to do a bit of work in between day-jobs, studying, family, etc. That does make it very hard to get things out on schedule. I think we do pretty well at just about every other aspect of professionalism… but we’re bad at getting stuff printed on time. Hopefully things will get better.

We are eagerly awaiting those proof copies and will be giving them a good check-over as soon as we get them.

In the meantime, here’s a teaser pic of the Contents page, just to whet your appetite.

We’ve secured a few copies of some of the Magnum Opus print run of DW, mostly so as to give us some stock for selling at conventions etc. However, we do have them available to UK buyers (only, for the moment) who might prefer to get their physical copies of the books directly from us. If you’re in the USA, it’s almost certainly better to go through DriveThru. We also had DriveThru send us a few copies of the main rulebook (our printing, this time), just so as to ensure we could do some decent bundle deals that at least have enough books in to let you play.

Individual Books (all Magnum Opus editions, other than Core Book, which is the Serpent King Games edition)

Postage & Packing is £5 for any one or two books (excluding the core rulebook), or £7.50 for the core rulebook plus up to two smaller books. Sorry about that, but Royal Mail prices are high, and books are heavy. That price does include insurance though.

If you want to place an order, send us the relevant funds to info@serpentking.com via PayPal, and I’ll get the books parcelled up and posted out within a week or two. This is just a question of me taking the books up the hill from my house to the post office, rather than some bigger business that has a postroom operative, so I’m not going to guarantee a delivery date, but usually I’d sooner get them in the post and out of the house ASAP.

At Serpent King Games, we’re fans of Dragon Warriors as well as the current publishers of the game. We recognise the essential contribution that fans have made in keeping interest in the game alive over the past three decades or so. We are very happy to see additions to the Dragon Warriors setting, in the form of free fan-made websites or other internet-based content such as free e-books or e-zines. However, it is essential that all Dragon Warriors fan sites adhere to the following Fan Policy:

1. Fan websites (or e-books, e-zines, etc.) must not be commercial enterprises. We have no objection to a fan site covering its costs through the use of adverts or similar, but you must not charge people to download or access fan-made material based on the Dragon Warriors setting.

2. Fan websites(or e-books, e-zines, etc.) are explicitly NOT permitted to reprint copyright material, including such items as art, character professions, monsters, or adventures that have been printed by Serpent King Games or other official Dragon Warriors publishers.

3. You may reference names, places, etc. from the Dragon Warriors setting.

4. All fan websites (or e-books, e-zines, etc.) must include the following text, in legible form, on the front page or on the first page that refers to Dragon Warriors or Legend:

“This website includes material based on the Dragon Warriors setting, as created by and copyright (c) Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson, and used according to the terms of the Serpent King Games Fan Policy. We are not permitted to charge you to use or access this content. This website is not published, endorsed, or officially approved by Serpent King Games. For more information about Dragon Warriors products and Serpent King Games, please visit www.serpentking.com”

5. We expect fan websites (or e-books, e-zines, etc.) to use the Dragon Warriors setting responsibly and legally. That means avoiding associating the setting with extreme graphic violence, explicit sexual content, hate speech against any particular real-world segment of society, or anything else that does not present Dragon Warriors in a positive light.

If you have any questions about the Fan Policy, please email info@serpentking.com

Yes, that really is the proof copy of the long-awaited SKG print edition of the Dragon Warriors core rulebook. This isn’t a new edition, in terms of the content — it’s just new to us. But that does mean that it will be back in print, not just in PDF, in a few weeks, once we receive and approve the proof. Sorry it’s taken us a while.